Saturday, September 5, 2009

Yep, typical night

Last nights game was the season in a nutshell; a nice starting pitching performance by fill-in Robinson Tejeda, just 1 run by the offense, and another late inning implosion by the bullpen money pit. To protect a 1 run lead Hillman insanely enough sent out Jamey Wright (4.66 ERA), John Bale (5.93, though he hurt himself rather quickly), and Roman Colon (5.79). Joakim Soria who hadn't pitched since September 1st sat and watched. (Fun stat; the Royals are 7-2 when Soria gets more than 3 outs.) In my opinion that's a failure on Moore's part to give Hillman any other viable options and a failure on Hillman's part for not using the one good option he did have.

My guess is that Hillman is banking on Soria making an appearance today due to Greinke pitching and he didn't want him to run up a high a pitch count and be unavailable. I'm sure he would have let him pitch the 9th, at least I hope so because Soria hasn't pitched in consecutive games since July 27th and 28th. So it's really hard to say what Hillman would have done but I wish he would've went for the win.

Josh Anderson has no business being on this roster (along with about a dozen other guys but that's a post for a different day). He was bad with Detroit (.242/.282./315) and has been even worse for KC (.242/.277/.242). Last nights failed sacrifice bunt was just another reason why he has been a waste of space. If your only asset is speed and you can't lay down a bunt when called upon then you have no business playing at all. Calling for the bunt is another story - a guy on second with no outs is never the time to sacrifice an out. I hate that. The guy has zero power so he probably would've hit a slow roller anyway, it just didn't make sense. The .315/.364/.419 he put up in '07 & '08 seems like a long time ago. His future probably is in the NL (after he soaks up about 1000 PA's with the Royals of course) where it should be.
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I know next to nothing about the return KC got for Daniel Gutierrez but Royalscentricity has provided a nice analysis of the trade by Scott Lucas of the The Newberg Report. (Pina doesn't excite me much but if Smith is a DDJ clone then wouldn't that make him better than every other Royals outfielder?)